When loads of loose articles are to be manually carried, a device commonly used for assistance is the wheelbarrow. However, wheelbarrows suffer from a variety of drawbacks. For instance, to load a wheelbarrow with items on the ground, the user must either bend down to pick up the items or utilize a tool such as a shovel, typically requiring the user to bend over and lift up the items in a repetitive fashion. Not only must the item to be loaded be lifted to a level even with a floor of the wheelbarrow but it must be additionally lifted over a rim of the wheelbarrow and then set down into the wheelbarrow. Additionally, the single wheel of the wheelbarrow provides lateral instability for the load and the user must exert significant steadying lateral forces to ensure that the load is not tipped, especially when traveling over uneven terrain. Numerous different manually driven carts have been developed to improve on the basic wheelbarrow. Some such carts enhance lateral stability by providing two wheels rotatable about a common axis and spaced on opposite sides of a container portion of the cart. Many of these carts additionally utilize large wheels to assist in rolling the carts over uneven terrain. For instance, page 9 of the 1997 Rubbermaid catalog published by Consolidated Plastics Company, Inc. of Twinsburg, Ohio shows large wheeled carts which utilize such a two wheel configuration. While such two wheel carts do provide additional ease in using the cart once a load is placed within the cart, these carts are not easily loaded and unloaded due to their single orientation significantly above ground level.
Other inventions are known which utilize two wheels and have multiple orientations to assist in loading container portions of such inventions. For instance, the wheel scoop taught by McCrary (U.S. Pat. No. 1,015,969) and the truck taught by Smith (U.S. Pat. No. 1,006,985) teach the use of two wheels attached to a frame with handles on the frame which can attach to a container portion in multiple different orientations. While the carts disclosed by the patents to McCrary and Smith do have orientations where a floor of the container portion of the cart is lowered for loading ease, these prior art devices still suffer from numerous drawbacks. Specifically, these devices; utilize small wheels located away from a front end of a container portion of the device. Hence, the handles must either be placed on the ground or supported in some fashion to keep the container portion in a loading configuration. Additionally, the rearward location of the wheels of these prior art devices increases an amount of force necessary to dump a load out of the container portion.
Accordingly, a need exists for a ground level loading cart which can rest in a ground loading orientation with a handle remaining above the ground and which can be easily shifted from a loading orientation to a transport orientation and have a load within a container thereof carried and dumped when desired.